“Aye, but it’s even slower than usual. Might be a network problem.”
Ben took another swig of his tea, swallowed, then set the mug down. “I could go and ask Moira if she knows what’s going on.” He caught Hamza’s puzzled look, and quickly corrected. “Ask at reception, I mean. If anyone should know, then it’s—”
“Got it,” Hamza announced. “It’s kicking in now. Must’ve just been congestion, or something.”
“Oh. Good. Aye,” Ben said, relaxing back into his chair and trying not to hide his disappointment. “Must’ve been that, right enough.”
He picked up his mug again, and nursed it in his hands as he watched Hamza tapping away at the keyboard.
“How you doing, son?” he asked, which drew a confused look from Hamza.
“Eh, just getting set up.”
“No, I mean… in general. How are you doing?” Ben said. “You seemed a bit… down for a while there.”
Hamza gave a little nod. “You were talking to DCI Logan.”
Ben tried very hard to look innocent, but made a bit of a meal of it. “I mean, he may have mentioned that you were feeling a bit… out of sorts.”
“I was,” Hamza confirmed. “But I’m fine now. I was feeling a bit… I don’t know. Useless. Like the stuff we do—that I was doing—didn’t matter.”
“It matters, son,” Ben assured him.
“Oh, I know. I know. We found Sinead. We got Shona back,” Hamza replied. “We might not win them all, but we win some. And that counts for something.”
Ben raised his mug in toast. “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” he said, then he nodded at the computer. “Now, what’s the plan?”
“Right, so, here’s what I’m thinking,” the DS declared. “We want background on André Douville and his weird cult thing, same on…” He checked his notes. “…Oberon Finley-Lennox, that MSP.”
“Yes to both of those,” Ben said. He pointed to the screen. “Maybe go through missing persons around the time that Bernie turned up. See if there’s anything that’ll give us a better idea of who he actually is.”
“Aye, good call, sir,” Hamza said.
Ben slapped his thighs, then stood up. “Right, well, that’ll keep you busy for a while. No point in me sitting here twiddling my thumbs, is there?”
Hamza raised his eyebrows. “Um, no. Suppose not. What will you do?”
Ben put his hands on his lower back and stretched. “Och, I think I’ll just get a few steps in.” He tapped the centre of his chest. “Doctor’s orders for the old ticker. You be alright here on your own?”
“I’m sure I’ll cope, sir. You go get… your steps in. The heart needs what the heart needs.”
Ben’s eyes narrowed a fraction as he tried to suss out if there was any meaning behind the Detective Sergeant’s response. Hamza had already turned his attention back to the computer now, though, and was giving nothing away.
“Aye, son,” Ben agreed. He blew into his hand and sniffed it, then fished a packet of Polos out of his pocket. “I suppose it does, at that.”
Ben stood patiently on the other side of the glass, waiting for Moira Corson to look up from the form she was in the process of filling out. He had no idea what the form was, but given the level of concentration she was displaying towards it, he could only assume it was somehow connected to lasting peace in the Middle East.
He cleared his throat for a second time, and gave another tap on the glass.
“I can see you, Detective Inspector. I know you’re there,” Moira said, not looking up. “But unless this is a work-related enquiry, I have nothing to say. Some of us still take our jobs seriously. I know that’s hard to believe in this day and age, but there we are.”
“Eh, aye. Well, maybe it is work-related,” Ben said.
Moira sighed, placed a finger on the paperwork to mark her place, then looked up. “Is it?”
Ben smiled, shrugged, and shook his head all at once. “Well, I mean, no, not exactly, but—”
“Then please move along, Detective Inspector,” Moira said, lowering her head again. “I need to get this paperwork completed in the next seven minutes.”
Ben frowned. “Seven minutes? Why, what’ll happen if you don’t?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“That’s what I said. Nothing,” Moira confirmed. “But that’s when I’m due my afternoon break.”
Without looking, she reached under the desk, then placed a pristine copy of Love It! magazine on the counter between them and slid it through the gap at the bottom of the glass. “Maybe you could go stick the kettle on.”
Ben grinned as he picked up the magazine. He rolled it up, then tapped it against the counter. “Aye,” he said, practically skipping towards the door that would take him back to the rest of the station. “I’m sure I can manage that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dinky pulled open the door on the third knock, shot a positively filthy look upwards, and spat out the first few words of a sentence demanding to know what the caller thought they were playing at.
It was at this point that he realised he was not looking at a face, as he had expected, and had instead fixed his glare on the chest of a substantially larger than anticipated man.
He took a step back to give him a better angle, rallied quickly, and launched into his tirade with renewed enthusiasm.
“What the hell’s with all the knocking? Didn’t you see the sign?” the little man demanded. “No cold callers. And what have you done to my dog?”
“We’ve done nothing to your dog,” Logan assured him.
“Then how come it’s just standing there and not trying to chew your nuts off? You must’ve done something to him!”
Logan wasn’t sure what the correct term was for describing someone of Dinky’s stature. There had been a training course that had touched on it at some point, he was sure. But then, there had been training courses that had touched on a lot of things over the years, most of which he’d forgotten or ignored.
This had been one of the important ones, though. The polis had been coming under heavy fire for alleged institutional racism, and mandatory training had been brought in as a matter of urgency.
It had been possibly the most patronising hour of Logan’s career, and he was pretty sure the content of the training itself was the most racist thing about it. Logan had asked the higher-ups if they genuinely believed that a forty-five minute training session—fifteen minutes at the end were spent filling out the feedback forms—was going to combat institutional racial bias.
“Fingers crossed!” they’d said. And without a hint of irony, either.
The session had been eighty percent about how to appropriately engage with people of other races and cultures, ten percent about those of other sexual and gender identities, and then a bit at the end that covered—and Logan remembered the quote verbatim—‘any other oddities we might meet out there.’